Building a Thinkpad Collection

Oct 31, 2023 | Computing

My obsession with Thinkpads started with a run to the Tip Shop and spotting a pair of laptop old Thinkpads, and it only snow balled from there.

Starting off with a R50 and R51

The pair were an R50 and R51e, with the later having a broken screen. My hope was that I could use the broken screen one to repair the other. I ended up taking the keyboard and other small bits from the R51 to repair the R50. I managed to get a working version of Windows 98SE on it which was great for old gaming and playing with old software.

Next comes the 325 and 380D

In a haul from a Vintage Tech Sale I picked up a pair of 300 series laptops as well. These ones had no batteries and needed HDD replacements. Other than a CMOS battery replacement and a ram upgrade these laptops just worked. The STN screens definitely leave much to be desired. The 380D is useful as it has a CD drive, floppy drive and can boot from the PCMCIA slot.

Adding some T41, T42 and T43’s to the collection

These were were a trademe haul. Over the R50, they aren’t that much better other than dedicated GPU’s and faster CPU’s, but they are all Pentium M models. I have been using these to experiment with old Linux distros and XP installs. As usual they all needed new CMOS batteries and HDD’s and took a lot more ram than they came with.

Finding a dead T60

This was a gift that turned out to be less useful, it was a Core 2 Duo era machine but had a bad screen so only useful as a dockable rig.

The holy grail 701C

This was a very random marketplace pickup. A $50 buy was a steal for a OG rig with bag and everything else, sadly it didnt power on. I have a whole project just on this laptop but it was such a great find.